3. We want to take advantage of the built in storage spaces and create a pool of physical SSD's (3) for parity.

4. Avoid buying an expensive SAN!

We want to then share this on the cluster so if one server goes down the other will still share the shared pool. If a drive goes down the parity will offer HA as well.

So, we have tried creating a lab with 2 servers running Standard Server 2016 and one of these PC's has a 500GB SATA HDD in it and a 256GB SSD Boot drive.The other virtually identical PC has a single 256GB SSD in it.

For some reason, if we install the role to cluster both of the PC's we cannot see the 500GB drive to add to the pool. If we destroy the cluster we can.

Not only do we need HA with the physical servers, we also need HA with the drives. Is it possible to have a cluster with Storage Spaces at the same time? Am I missing something?

Also, having tried adding the single standard SATA 500GB WD HDD to a storage spaces pool it failed anyway un-clustered with an error the drive was the wrong type!

Avoiding SAN... good. Storage Spaces.... not good or bad, just "a bit too new and limited to use" in many cases. Have you considered Starwind? It's also free, but way more mature and battle tested than Storage Spaces.

4 Replies

Avoiding SAN... good. Storage Spaces.... not good or bad, just "a bit too new and limited to use" in many cases. Have you considered Starwind? It's also free, but way more mature and battle tested than Storage Spaces.